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About Me

I blame Gene Roddenberry. All of this
is his fault. Well, him and Isaac Asimov. And Heinlein. There are a
lot of people I can blame all of this on, I suppose. I spent rather a
lot of my childhood ill, out of school more often than not, but the
one constant was always the books. Yes, I was one of those kids who
always had his head in a book, no matter what; trips out were a
success if I came home with an armful of books, and likely as not I
would have read them all over the course of the next couple of days.
The constant was science-fiction; fantasy as well to a lesser extent,
but I grew up reading Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, or all of those
thousands of collections of short stories that came out in the
sixties and seventies – and which were available in second-hand
stores for 50p at the perfect time to match a ten-year-old's budget.

I'll admit this now; I'm a Star Trek
fan. The old James Blish and Alan Dean Foster novelizations were a
companion for many years, and I graduated from there to reading an
awful lot of the published Trek fiction. Then came BBC2 and its 6pm slot...and I was completely lost. Universes spread out before me,
and I think it was around then that I was completely lost. College
beckoned, and I got better, but still – most of my lunchtimes were
spent looking for more books. Well, that and playing Magic: The
Gathering. Or running role-playing campaigns that at that point went
nowhere. Happy days.

University; where I managed to do far
too poorly at a degree in War Studies, at King's. Today I would do a
hell of a lot better, but somehow I'd managed to get the idea that I
was going to save the world. I found out quite quickly that they had
me outnumbered. Still had a lot of fun, though, ran a reasonably
popular D&D fanzine called OD&DITIES which taught me a hell
of a lot, notably that I could write very quickly when necessary but
that I couldn't do anything other than basic layout worth a damn.
Really should have studied harder; but it really did teach me an
awful lot, even if most of it didn't sink in for years.

I suppose I could define my twenties as
the 'Hair Years'; for I just let it grow. Reaction from school, when
my old headmaster preferred crew cuts, I suppose. After an abortive
attempt – twice – to set up my own publishing company (where I
learned that I could write really
quickly, that I still couldn't lay out, and that 2003 was far too
early to set up a PDF magazine) I managed to accidentally get a job
at a media monitoring company. Yes, accidentally. Clicked the wrong
button on the job website. Hell, it worked.

There,
of course, chaos followed me. Somewhat to my own surprise, I slowly
rose through the ranks until I settled in a
lower-middle-lower-management position where I was pretty
comfortable, though I had picked a hell of a time to get into news
aggregation. Remember that big oil surge of the middle of the last
decade? I'd just started running the petrochemicals section. About a
week before. Then, hoping for relief, I transferred to the financial
section. A week before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Had I moved
to government we would all be living in a complete anarchy right now.
If you want to blame me, feel free!

Years
of that taught me to write really really quickly,
how to proofread really really really quickly
– because instant perfection was all that would do – and that
ultimately working nights for eight years was killing me. Oh, yes,
the hours were ten till seven. PM to AM, of course. I swear, some
winters I never even saw the sun. I still wanted something different;
as my sense of dissatisfaction with my lot grew, I finally decided
that I had managed to get stuck in a rut. A comfortable rut, to be
fair, but I reached thirty, looked around, and figured that if I
didn't do something I would still be there for another thirty years.

You
see, at the background, there had always been the writing. I
submitted my first short story at around fifteen, I think it was to
Interzone, and it was absolutely dreadful. I mean, really really bad.
Lost to history, thank
goodness. During college I wrote a novel, and it wasn't as bad. Still
bad, yes, and I am glad that it is missing, presumed lost. University
that ebbed a bit, but with the fanzines and the publishing I was
still writing, still working. In the interim between university and
work, I ended up writing a couple of books, one of them a comic
autobiography of my student political years that I really should use
one of these days; I was actually rather proud of it at the time.
Work hurt my writing, but I still plodded through. A few more bits
and pieces came forth, and vanished into the ether; I was stretching
my creative muscles by running a series of RPG campaigns over this
period, but ultimately, it wasn't really as satisfying.

Finally,
to return to the rut; I decided ultimately that I wanted to be a
writer. I'd always known that, really, but I'd had to push it to the
back a bit. Looking back, I probably didn't have to – but I'm glad
I did, as I'm a much better writer now than I was at 22. Damn well
should be, I suppose! Surprising my boss, I sent in my notice, and
decided to throw the dice and see if I could make a living at it; I
knew that I could only properly concentrate on this if I had that sword at my throat, the need to make it work. I handed in my
notice in November; I ended up doing a four-and-a-half-month notice
period (the employee handbook was a bit vague on how much I needed to
give; I opted to give loads.) As March, 2013 dawned, I was a free man.

Much to my surprise, I must confess, the plan actually seems to have worked! As I write this, at the end of 2015, I'm just about to publish the sixteenth book in the Battlecruiser Alamo series, and will shortly be launching a second military science-fiction series...

I want to tell you that I have read over 28 of your books in just over 31 days. I could not stop read the Alamo series, I would read a book almost every day. Then I start d on the Star cruiser series and read both of those books in one day. I can't wait for you to finish more about f those series, it killing me to wait for them. You are a great writer. I put you in the same category as Louis L'amour, Zane Gray, William W. Johnstone, and a course Gene Rodenberry. Please keep writing more great books.